advertising

Editor's note: The following column was provided by Darren Herman who is a digital media enthusiast and serial entrepreneur.

I haven’t blogged about Google’s new Ad Planner so thought that I’d start my week talking about it and sharing a sexy and hot observation I made totally randomly.

What is the purpose of Ad Planner? Media Planners spend quite a bit of time trying to figure out where their brands or clients’ audiences are so that the brand can buy media to reach them. For digital media, many agencies use either Comscore or @Plan; both aren’t perfect, but they certainly help us organize thousands of potential sites for media planning.

Google is entering the world of Ad Planning. Why? I suspect it’s because they make it easy for anyone to purchase media on any site as they come into the Google Network. If you’re on the Google Network as a publisher, then ad dollars should follow as buying media for the small tire shop in Boise or a Fortune 100 brand can now reach you for display based online media.

I took a spin around the interface tonight and looked for Males, Ages 35-44, $150k+ in HHI, and have a Graduate Degree. It’s very intuitive, no frills - and gives a nice site list. If you use DoubleClick’s MediaVisor, you can export this and can finish planning in your preferred tool.

A funny thing happened however as I dug deeper. If you look closely at which sites come up first, you’ll see that the #1 site for this search is BDJGirls (Link Warning: ADULT CONTENT), an escort service. I’m all for beautiful women (and there are some on their site), but I don’t think I’m going to be spending my brand’s money on an escort service’s website. After reviewing their site, they don’t even accept advertising.

To add a bit of humor to this, BDJGirls is listed in the Weddings category. Does this mean that these males are looking for dates to weddings?

Maybe Ad Planner needs some refinement? What’s evident however is that DoubleClick is very important to Google’s future strategy.

Brooklyn-based Outside.in presented their business updates yesterday and I've embedded the video below. CEO Mark Josephson explained how Outside.in works and why "place matters" and why things near you matter. He noted that local hasn't been done right yet (of course his product gets it right) because you may have multiple communities in the same ZIP code that are very different.

Their "radar" product lets you monitor local items in a FriendFeed-style fashion. Not sure how it knows which Twitter posts are in which area at precisely that moment but hey it's Web 2.0! Seriously, if they can do this well, it could be a strong offering - especially when breaking news (earthquake, typhoon, lack of hot Krispy Kremes) hits an area.

Josephson ended by showing us some of their secret sauce with regards to their algorithm and how they decide who is local and what content is local. It's towards the end of the video below if you want to skip to that part.

FYI - Erick Schonfeld from TechCrunch was also at the event and has prepared a good review of the VC sections of the event. view the video »

It's been a few weeks since the last blinkx release and I was getting a bit worried about the company. But today they are out with a new partnership, this time with MEN7. MEN7 describes themselves as delivering on-demand, high definition, dynamic television programming to men ages 25 to 54.

blinkx will use their video search technology to place relevant advertising next to the videos served on the MEN7 network and will share revenue with MEN7. Other financial terms of the deal were not released.

blinkx now reports 350 partners and 26 million hours of indexed video and audio content. Their latest partnerships include Revision3 and Kiplinger.

Real estate listing and search engine Trulia is announcing the launch of Trulia Pro tonight. Trulia Pro is a self-service advertising program for real estate agents. The program allows agents to buy sponsored listings and spotlight ads in the locations and ZIP codes you wish. The listings show at the top of the results and the company says they are 4-7x more likely to be clicked.

This news comes a month after Trulia launched their real estate ad network. The pricing plans are $39/month or a yearly plan with 25% off. They are offerin 3 months free if you are advertising anywhere online - more details on their blog. At $39/month, most will signup for it - at least to test it for a few months.

Unlike Google AdWords, this program is flat-rate and ads will rotate and will match the user's search as closely as possible.

Greg Sterling notes that competitor Zillow has offered self-service ads for 18 months.

Last September, video ad provider YuMe Networks announced that they would be handling advertising for Microsoft's Interactive TV. Today, both YuMe and Microsoft are making another announcement regarding a new partnership. Beginning this summer, YuMe will provide video advertising network management capabilities and sales for unsold inventory on Microsoft's online properties.

Basically YuMe becomes the default video advertising partner for Microsoft. This means that if Microsoft can't fill an ad impression through their network, YuMe will handle the ad serving. No details were provided on the estimated number of ads nor the financial terms of this new relationship.

YuMe currently reports 46 million monthly unique visitors. Check out our review of YuMe Neworks from last year.

Just hours after we listed all of the major search engines and their advertising partners, we've been informed that Wikia Search has added Google AdSense ads this morning. I've embedded a screenshot below so you can see the ads. They were not there last night. I am guessing just like the search engine, the ads must be in alpha as they seem to be squished into an iframe box.

Update 11:45am - Looks like they removed the box around the ads.

Update: Live conference call notes are now available.

Yahoo is out this afternoon with the announcement of their search advertising deal with Google. Frankly this is a huge sellout to me and makes me fearful that Yahoo can actually deliver on search or online advertising. Yahoo is no longer a competitor to Google in my opinion.

Also included in the announcement, this deal also covers non-search properties and has a potential 10-year term.

Here's the entire press release for some light reading this evening -- we've provided additional value by highlighting the important parts:

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company, announced today that it has reached an agreement with Google Inc. that will enhance its ability to compete in the converging search and display marketplace, advancing the company’s open strategy. The agreement enables Yahoo! to run ads supplied by Google alongside Yahoo!’s search results and on some of its web properties in the United States and Canada. The agreement is non-exclusive, giving Yahoo! the ability to display paid search results from Google, other third parties, and Yahoo!’s own Panama marketplace.

continue reading »

comScore is ouit today with a new report regarding U.S. online advertising within the quick-serve restaurants category for March 2008. The report leads with McDonalds online advertising numbers which lead the pack at 295 million online display ads for the month. Quiznos came in second (huh?) followed by KFC, PapaJohns and Subway. In fact, McDonalds nearly tripled the online ad impressions that Quiznos ran.

With the stupid Subway campaigns for $5 footlongs, I would have imagined Subway ranking higher in impressions than Quiznos.

While 295 million impressions might seem like a lot, comScore ranks McDonalds at #113 on their list of total ad impressions for March 2008.

This news comes after TNS Media Intelligence reported that online advertising spend was up 8.5% for the 1st quarter 2008.

In February Nokia launched their mobile ad network. Today Nokia is announcing the Nokia Advertising Alliance which will attempt to make mobile advertising easier for brand advertisers. The alliance brings together the many phases of mobile advertising: planning, executing, and tracking.

Perhaps this is one way that Nokia can compete with Apple - mobile advertising. If they can win over brands and their advertising money, will they want to push Nokia devices so consumers and their customer base can view and interact with their advertising messaging?

The Advertising Alliance is made up of two parts (from the release):

• The Nokia Media Network which gives reach to millions of mobile consumers through advertising on more than 100 blue-chip mobile publishers, operator partners and Nokia properties.
• Nokia Interactive Solutions that creates end-to-end, high performance mobile campaigns for brands from banner ads, mobile internet sites and location finders to mobile coupons, click-to-call and other advanced mobile mechanics.

Four companies have been announced as launch members of the Alliance: i-movo, Mobile Acuity, Mobiqa, and uLocate. More will be named soon.

Nokia - go own mobile advertising - Apple certainly isn't thinking about it.

Just a week after announcing that they will support OpenSocial, European social network Netlog has announced that Yahoo will market the service in Europe. The deal is an exclusive one in Germany and Netlog is Yahoo's first network partner in Germany. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Comscore reports that Netlog's services reach 1.3 million unique users, who spend an average of 177 minutes on its sites and reach a total of 676 million page views per month.

Could this be a replacement for Bebo which may leave Yahoo now that AOL has acquired the social network. And more importantly, could this be the first step towards a Yahoo acquisition?